There remains one obstacle to achieving any of those reforms, which are well summarised in the Sunday Telegraph. Cameron must now abandon the break from Europe's mainstream, wished on him by his Ukip tendency, and dissolve the irrelevant and incoherent group he created in the European parliament. Under the Lisbon treaty, MEPs gain significant new powers of crucial interest to Britain that must not be wasted.

Cameron's new approach was endorsed, apparently, by the vast majority of Westminster parliamentarians, but the Better Off Out brigade – whose members Cameron will not allow in his shadow cabinet – have publicly broken ranks.

Two Better Off Out MEPs, Daniel Hannan and Roger Helmer – the core of Brussels' notorious anti-EU H-block – have resigned their spokesmanships to give them more time to campaign for a referendum, any referendum, on Britain's EU membership. David Cameron should expel them from the Conservative party not only for this hazard to his chances of becoming PM, but also for their serial disloyalty. If they are not expelled – as I was for no stated reason – Cameron may be accused of double standards.

Dan Hannan's defiance accentuates the failure of the Tory high command's previous EU approach. He was "dog-whistle Dan", whose populist anti-Brussels approach was intended to appeal to Ukip voters – and worse. He was given a ten-minute slot at the Tory's Spring Forum by William Hague. Hannan has agitated since 1998 for a split from the EPP – the alliance of all the EU's centre-right parties. Hague, whose role in the failed strategy is rightly now coming under the spotlight, tried and failed in 1999 to find new partners.

The enlargement of the EU in 2004 to central/eastern Europe, Cyprus and Malta offered new opportunities. In 2005, during the leadership campaign, Cameron was persuaded by Better off Out to pledge to split from the EPP so as to win the hardline MPs' vote: another contender, David Davis – a former Europe minister – refused.

William Hague took charge of the search for partners. In 2006, he and Timothy Kirkhope, leader of the Tory MEPs, conducted the party's first "due diligence". The heads of the Tory MEPs' Brussels and London offices who did this study refused to work with the new European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group and sought jobs elsewhere. Has this and more recent research now been handed over by the Tories to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, as requested several weeks ago? I have submitted my own findings to them.

The main problem is that Hague recommended including 15 Polish MEPs from the Law and Justice party, which has absorbed the even more extreme nationalist League of Polish Families (described on the BBC's Today Programme by Poland's chief rabbi as "beyond the pale" because of their anti-Semitism) and the ghastly League of Self-Defence.

When Hague designated Michal Kaminski – a Pole with recent antisemitic, homophobic and racist links – as the ECR's candidate for vice-president of the European parliament, I stood against him and won, losing the Tory whip but gaining the support of many for my stand against the rise of "disguised extremism". In a deal between London and Warsaw, Kaminski instead replaced Kirkhope – elected that day – as leader of the ECR

Hague then initiated an extraordinary campaign involving at one time eight party press officers, attacking me and puffing the ECR, but especially defending Kaminski. On 15 September, without contacting me or giving a reason, Hague expelled me from the party.

Hague's campaign included parading Kaminski before the Jewish Chronicle and the more credulous blogger Iain Dale at the party conference: Dale's interview is reprinted across five pages in Total Politics, of which Lord Ashcroft owns 25%. Now, according to the Sunday Times, the ECR has gone into a bunker. Why?

Perhaps because Hague has used EU rules to create a Brussels-based transnational alliance of parties and a political foundation, based on the ECR's MEPs, to win about €1m of public funds. And who has he put in charge of these new entities? Anti-EU Dan Hannan, now leading the campaign against official Tory Europe policy, and Geoffrey van Orden, who had immersed himself in the process of building the ECR.

As to Kaminski, Hague's attempts to portray him positively are falling apart. A key player, Poland's chief rabbi Michael Schudrich, who appeared to support Kaminski on the BBC's Today Programme, told last week's Jewish Chronicle that he finds Kaminski's continuing defence of his 2001 attempts to stop a presidential apology for the 1941 massacre of hundreds of Jews by Poles at the village of Jedwabne, part of the Holocaust, "distasteful and wrong". This event was so appalling that it is the basis for Our Class – currently playing at the National Theatre.

Schudrich questions Kaminski's version of his membership of the National Revival of Poland (NOP), "a nasty, fascist-leaning, antisemitic party". Kaminski says he was in it as a 14 or 15-year-old. But NOP itself told the Daily Telegraph that he was in it between 1989 and 1991, aged between 17 and 20. Dissembling like this may explain why his Tory minders do not want Kaminski exposed to Channel 4 News, BBC Newsnight or the Sunday Times, all of whom have tried recently to interview him. Is this because Kaminski's antisemitic remarks are a matter of record and easily discovered on the web? He denied wearing the fascist Chrobry Cross, the NOP symbol, in 2000 and then retracted his denial.

The last time Kaminski gave a British television interview was on 15 July, when inter alia he pretended he had never used homophobic language. The BBC found a Polish television clip of him describing gays as pedaly – "boy bangers": when challenged by the interviewer that the term is offensive, he repeats it. There is much more.

The reputational damage to Cameron because of the new ECR group has not been restricted to the left. Many have observed its inability to shape legislation, with one example being the failure to get any of the five key spokesmanships in the European parliament on the current economic crisis. It is widely seen as an incoherent collection of Eurosceptics, individuals from marginal parties and extremists. Bizarrely, Kaminski, the leader of this so-called anti-federalist group, is pro-Lisbon treaty.

Will David Cameron have the courage to do what veteran Yorkshire Post columnist Bernard Dineen suggests today, namely to rescind my expulsion and give the Conservative party the alliance its history and policies deserve, with the mainstream EPP?

• This article has been edited to clarify that Lord Ashcroft owns 25% of Total Politics